To quote the opening lines of a Mary Chapin Carpenter song, “To be alive is to know your purpose / It’s your place in the world.” While “A Place in the World” does not rate inclusion on the playlist of songs to listen to while reading Clint Bowman’s new book, If Lost (Loblolly Press 2024), it does provide a helpful starting point for discussing it.
Finding one’s place in the mountains of North Carolina or the depths of the neighboring Swannanoa Valley often requires the experience and expertise of a practiced trail guide. And finding one’s place emotionally and spiritually in the world sometimes takes the equally important gifts of a poet guide. In his debut full-length collection of poems, Bowman provides evidence that he can serve well in both capacities. Indeed, it seems to be his purpose.
The forty-eight poems which compose the collection are arranged by Bowman as a three-part how-to guide with the respective subtitles: Step One: Establish Your Bearings, Step Two: Notice Nature, and Step Three: Don’t Be Afraid. For proper orientation, one might begin with the book’s very last piece, the title poem, which sounds the key notes:
Look around,
establish your bearings.
Know your way out,
so you can tell
someone lost one day—
go downhill
if disarrayed,
act like water—
don’t be afraid.
Returning to the beginning, the first world that Bowman as a person and poet must learn to navigate (and ultimately find his way out of) is the culture of his upbringing. His native Davidson County was once the center of a thriving furniture manufacturing industry in North Carolina. But the world Bowman depicts is anything but prosperous and nurturing. It is instead the world of binge drinkers and “a child’s / broken dresser,” rusted rims of bicycles and suicide, “fentanyl and food stamps,” broken church signs and turkey vultures praying over “The broken bones / of [an] abandoned billboard.” Against the current of dominant culture in which he often catches glimpses of himself, though, he ends the section with “Shadows,” a poem of defiance and self-definition:
These six beers won’t be
enough
to forget the look
on my sister’s face
when I told her
I’m never coming back
to this place.
The world to be navigated in the second section of the book (Notice Nature) is the world of nature, or more often the encroachment of civilization on the natural world and the resulting tension between the two. While Bowman does not offer definitive resolution to the conflict, his poems here serve as cautionary tales, as we see in “Act Natural:”
Our ecosystem is bleeding
at the gums
from this floss we’ve strung,
yet we still ask it
to smile for the picture.
And again in “Detox:”
So our sick planet
is always hungover—
throwing up hurricanes
and tornadoes—
desperate to detox
the waste that’s within.
Poems in the third section of the book (Don’t Be Afraid) renew the theme of defiance and self-definition. The tone here is often elegiac, as in the poem “Hide & Seek:”
Our court is covered in mud
from the last flood
that turned the creek into a river.
But our initials
remain in the stump
beside your house.
And it still feels like
we’re playing hide & seek
every time I bring you lilacs
in the cemetery.
The overriding attitude, however, is the poet’s cynicism not towards spirituality itself but towards the tightly prescribed religious beliefs imposed on him in his youth. That attitude can be seen most dramatically in “Cut the Line”:
Over time,
I’ve untangled myself
from this line
attached to the pulpit.
Now that I’m older,
I’ve dried off
the holy water,
and spit out the bait
they placed
on my tongue.
And that is what Bowman hopes his readers will not be afraid to do either: find their own place in the world, even at the cost of going against the current.
A unique feature of Bowman’s collection is a playlist of songs to listen to while reading the poems. As mentioned at the outset, no song by Mary Chapin Carpenter made it on the list, but “A Place in the World” would be a good candidate if he ever wanted to reconsider. “What I’m looking for, after all this time,” she sings, “Keeps me moving forward, trying to find it.” And the same search also seems to be what keeps Bowman moving forward as a person as a poet.
Clint Bowman
A native of Davidson County, North Carolina, Clint Bowman now lives in the fabled town of Black Mountain. During the day, he works for the town as Recreation Coordinator leading hikes and other outdoor programs. In the evening, he co-facilitates the Dark City Poets Society—a free poetry group offered through the local library in Black Mountain. If Lost is his first full-length collection of poetry. A chapbook, Pretty Sh!t, was published in May 2023 by Bottlecap Press.
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